one day last year I was in the gym and went to the lat pulldown machine in the middle of my workout. someone had it on 200 lbs or something, so I pulled the pin out of the weight stack, and the entire attachment fell on the back of my head. this was a really heavy metal attachment, must have been like 20-30 lbs fell on my head. I got really dizzy for ~30 seconds and had a big bump on my head, but that was somehow all that happened.

to this day, I’m kind of scared and cautious whenever I change the weight on those machines.

  • SorosFootSoldier [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    28
    ·
    7 months ago

    I had alcohol poisoning that lead to a seizure. I was in a induced coma for a few days, put my mom through hell rest her soul. I’m lucky I didn’t suffer any long term damage from that incident. Thankfully I’m sober now, even though I relapsed a couple months ago, I usually get real long terms of sobriety in between little hits when I fall off the wagon usually because of a life incident.

  • someone [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    25
    ·
    7 months ago

    Can the stupidity be someone else’s?

    Picture a standard 4-lane-street intersection with all the usual traffic lights. The arrows indicate the flow of traffic, regular north american right-hand-driving rules. #1 in the diagram is me, making a right turn from the rightmost lane. I had a green light and thus the right-of-way. Every north american driver knows the rules of that situation, right? Slow to a safe turning speed given the road conditions, make sure there’s no pedestrians anywhere they shouldn’t be, then complete the turn.

    #2 on that diagram is a taxi driver who made a U-turn against a red light directly into the lane I was turning in to, and at a much higher speed than he should have. He came within about two meters of slamming the front of his car directly into my driver’s side door, which would certainly have resulted in major injury and possibly death. The prick had the gall to be offended by my blaring the horn at him and looking directly at him and obviously screaming at him despite him not being able to hear my voice.

  • Coolkidbozzy [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    24
    ·
    edit-2
    7 months ago

    climbed up a several hundred-foot rock to see a sunset, slipped and almost uncontrollably fell on the way back down, had to get rescued by firefighters and almost a search-and-rescue helicopter that came for me after dangling from a couple handholds for 45 minutes

  • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    19
    ·
    edit-2
    7 months ago

    Made the mistake of walking my dog in a neighborhood full of insanely impractical pickup trucks with grills that are 5 feet off the ground. Almost got ran over.

  • RION [she/her]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    19
    ·
    7 months ago

    Did theater tech at my high school, safety wasn’t taken seriously so we didn’t wear harnesses when we were up in the rafters of a fairly large auditorium. Factor in my struggles with thoughts of suicide and the school might’ve had themselves a nasty little situation

    BUT my parents probably would’ve had a baller lawsuit. Missed opportunities…

  • dannoffs [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    19
    ·
    edit-2
    7 months ago

    I pretty frequently climb on rocks and shit around very fast moving large rivers by myself in places where maybe 5 people pass by on a busy day.

  • shreddingitlater [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    19
    ·
    7 months ago

    When I was a child, my mother decided to take me and my brother canoeing. It was chill at first, but then the dam upstream released some water or something and the current picked up. We came to a fork in the river and my mom wasn’t sure which way to go and we chose the wrong way - a part of the stream filled with trees and a drop at the end.

    My mom thinks I got knocked out of the canoe by one of the trees, but I actually just jumped out and held on to the canoe cause I was scared. Lost my grip on the canoe and somehow got pinned to a tree by the current while underwater. The river was too deep for me to stand on the bottom, I was just stuck and kind of drowning. Only reason I got out is cause my mom grabbed me while she was floating past, I think she also jumped out at some point. Managed to make it past the drop as well, it wasn’t as steep as it seemed. Stayed away from rapids for most of my life after that lol.

  • ZoomeristLeninist [comrade/them, she/her]@hexbear.netM
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    18
    ·
    7 months ago

    i was like 12 and we were on a family vacation and i decided to climb this waterfall for some reason. it was at least 20 feet high. when I was like a foot from the top, i slipped and started to fall, but i suddenly stopped falling and looked up to see my dad holding me by the straps of my life jacket. my dad saw me when i was close to the top and walked to the top (there were stairs) in case i fell. that would have been like falling out a second story window and could’ve easily been fatal or very badly injurious, especially since id fall right on a rock surface. im still impressed by my dads parental sixth sense

  • Findom_DeLuise [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    18
    ·
    7 months ago
    1. In the days before YouTube, I changed the brake pads on my car based on instructions in a Chilton’s manual. I may have also been slightly drunk while I did it. I Dunning-Krugered those fuckers right on. Three out of the four pad sets were fine, but the outer pad on the front driver’s side wheel wasn’t seated all the way into the caliper and must have slipped at some point. I remember driving on those pads for weeks and thinking the car felt rough/pulled to the right whenever I would brake, and then I noticed one day that the pad in question was just kind of dangling from one side of the clip. I don’t remember if I took it to a professional after that or fixed my own fuckup.
    2. The day after Halloween one year, I decided it would be funny to turn one of our Jack-o-lanterns into an improvised incendiary device. Improvised flamethrowers are a bit of a family tradition, so nothing new there… However, rather than reaching for the carburetor/choke/throttle body cleaner, I went for the first spray can that I could reach: brake cleaner. In case you’re not aware, igniting brake cleaner is a Very Bad Idea because the fumes are basically a choking agent that can and will kill you if you get a big enough whiff of it. Luckily, I must have been far enough back with my barbecue grill lighter that I didn’t inhale any of the stuff. Moral of the story: when making an improvised rapid wasp nest remover, use carb and choke cleaner spray, not brake cleaner.
    3. Ran with scissors once. Once.
    • SSJ2Marx@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      14
      ·
      7 months ago

      brake pads

      Ooh, this reminds me of one time I got into a fight with my mom over something stupid and jumped on my motorcycle to clear my head, completely forgetting that I was only halfway through replacing my brakes and needed to bolt everything back together. Luckily the front brakes were in place, but the morals of this story are never walk away from unfinished maintenance and never ride angry.

      • Findom_DeLuise [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        8
        ·
        7 months ago

        Holy shit, yeah.

        Also reminds me of another one where my car was being worked on, so an uncle lent me an old like 1983 Ford Escort with a 5-speed manual. He warned me that “sometimes the brakes will make a chkkkk, chkkkkk sound.” Cut to a week later when it turns out that, no, the brakes don’t just make a sound – the rear lines were completely rusted through, and the pressure loss caused all four to fail while I was trying to slow down from about 55 MPH on a country road to make a sharp right-hand turn. That led to some very panicked ratcheting through gears to engine brake, and luckily the front brakes still seemed to be able to grab a tiny bit with nothing in the lines. I drove the rest of the way home at about 10 MPH, and when I explained what had happened, I got called “ungrateful” for not being more appreciative of the death trap shitbox that had just tried to kill me.

        And these fucks wonder why I cut them out of my life 20 years ago.

  • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    17
    ·
    7 months ago

    Didn’t look when crossing with a green light as a kid and someone zoomed through the intersection. Someone stopped me from crossing.

    Oh another silly one as a kid, I don’t think my life was in serious danger but I had an allergic reaction to penicillin and waited until morning because I didn’t want to wake up my grandparents.